They are out of touch with Christ, these heretics; they have never been truly converted. They do not know him.
Well, we think like that too and that’s very natural. You long to see the old days back, when there were far more churches; you long to see the warehouses turning back into churches, in the reverse direction from what has happened over the years, to see great crowds in congregations; of course we do. Now, that makes us vulnerable to certain false teachers because that is what happened here, that the false teachers came along and they said, ‘Well, you want the crowds, we can do it. We know how to do it; we know how to get your numbers up in a dramatic, spectacular way. We can do that.’ Yes, they could possibly do it because what they were offering appealed to the fleshly thinking. You can get massive crowds if you do what people want you to do. Stop talking about sin for a start, stop talking about salvation, bring in the rock bands, do whatever the people want, let them have fun, clubs. Take away the hard parts – the need for repentance and forgiveness and conversion, why, then of course you will get more people in but it won’t be a church and this is the kind of thing that is happening here.